Other Stuff

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here:

A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search
for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model

There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside

Pair Customer Development with Agile Development

Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model

If You’re Afraid to Fail You’re Destined to Do So

Iterations and Pivots are Driven by Insight

Validate Your Hypotheses with Experiments

Success Begins with Buy-In from Investors and Co-Founders

No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers

Not All Startups Are Alike

Startup Metrics are Different from Existing Companies

Agree on Market Type – It Changes Everything

Fast, Fearless Decision-Making, Cycle Time, Speed and Tempo

If it’s not About Passion, You’re Dead the Day You Opened your Doors

Startup Titles and Functions Are Very Different from a Company’s

Preserve Cash While Searching. After It’s Found, Spend

Communicate and Share Learning

Startups Demand Comfort with Chaos and Uncertainty

Quite a few people have asked for a way to remember these without having to dig through the book. So by popular demand, here’s a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto. You can order a copy here.

54 Responses

I not ‘feelin’ the graphic-design-love here, (sorry) – even though I know the message trapped inside the info-graphic is great to rest my eyes on, I still want it to ‘pop’ & ‘sizzle’ – how about you run a crowd source competition on this … IMHO

Done and done. Thanks for sharing this. I am embracing this whole-heartedly and unlearning everything else I was taught about product development and starting up! Using your methods in conjunction with those of the Lean Startup has already yielded powerful results for me in as little as one month’s time. I spent several months prior to this with my head down in an office, not talking to customers, bleeding cash, with nothing to show for it. Now, I have clients, results, feedback, and tremendous opportunities in front of me to grow & improve. THANK YOU.

Congrats on publishing the book. Over the years, you have contributed an enormous amount to the way startups are approached and from what I have seen in your presentation at SXSW you do not disappoint in your new book.

However…I have to ask…why is the book available only in hardcover?? I would happily pay the same price to get the kindle edition. The reality is, there are increasingly *no* books that I want to get in hardcover. The reading experience of being able to easily highlight, share, and comment across the kindle ecosystem is invaluable to me…not to mention the fact that I always have my entire kindle library with me to be able to refer to without weighing myself down with paper books. I’d even go so far as to say that e-books have substantially increased my consumption of books as a whole.

Please make it easier to consume and spread the great work you have done. Make an e-book version available now. Charge the same price as for your hardcover if you like, but let your potential customers choose instead of making the choice for them. Don’t perpetuate the legacy publishing release windows. They no longer make any sense.

Thanks for all your effort and I hope to be able to buy your book in kindle format soon.

Thanks for this Steve, this will go up as a constant reminder (needed some decorations anyway) of what we are doing and where we came from.

Also, just wanted to let you know that you’ve been a great inspiration, and above all time-saver (have all your books, subscribe to your blog, have poured through the links on your site, and have watch some of your educational videos)… However, I still have a couple questions. It would be cool if you answered them Steve, but I am completely open to receiving advice from any of your followers as well.

1) In regards to one’s sales staff… what are some of the keys you’ve learned along the way to training and motivating the team? Is there a particular organizational design you’ve found works better than others for virtual sales teams? As for communication strategies between your sales engineers and customers, is there a workflow that you employ to increase sales (e.g., drip marketing, automated email system (what emails, when), etc)? What commission/pay structure do you find works best?

2) So I’ve not even started marketing my company (just finishing the completion of the alpha & MVP), but I’m now being approached by some international companies, and I’m in the position where we need to hire.. but are about a month out before we can afford some of the equipment (computers, software licenses, etc) for the people, and about 2-3 months out before we can afford the base pay for the sales people as they get trained and ready. Any suggestions? What’s the best way to approach this scenario?

Done! Thanks again, Steve. For several years now, you have been a driving force in changing the way people think and practice to create and deliver real value. Customers, entrepreneurs, and investors everywhere – take note!

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